Disease and the mind
Excerpts from the book, Love,
Medicine and Miracles by Bernie S. Siegel, M.D.
Compiled by Marvin Heikkila
A
new field of psychoneuroimmunology which links consciousness (the power of the
mind) and healing is something modern doctors have yet to fully
consider in
relation to understanding the nature of disease and healing.
There
have been thoughts that many diseases are inherited or handed down in our genes
to us from our ancestors. So much more so
for identical
twins, wouldn’t you think? You would think that since they are
identical in all respects except for their fingerprints, that they would also
carry the same
susceptibilities to disease and illness, wouldn’t you?
Quote (from the above mentioned
book): Recently a sixty-year-old twin with cancer came
into my office. Thirty years earlier her
identical twin sister
had died of cancer.
Her sister had been the “sick” one in the family and my patient had enjoyed
life until this last year, when she wanted to die and
developed cancer. If our future was pre-programmed could a
difference of thirty years occur?
No! Our state of consciousness
and disease are
inseparable.
Quote: I
have received letters from people who are surviving cancer, AIDS, amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis (ALS), multiple sclerosis (MS) and other
illnesses when no
doctor thought they would. So I do have
hope and my belief that there are “no incurable diseases, only incurable
people” remains.
I don’t know the future
for any individual but I do know there is hope. Just as I know there are many
people dead today because they have lived out
their doctor’s prediction.
I
do not see death as a failure either. I
see the fear of letting go of childhood pain and erroneous messages as a
failure. The more I work with
people, the
more I realize how much both positive and negative, we owe to our
upbringings. When we take on the
challenge of disease and life we are
a success.
When
one is faced with one’s mortality, one has to reevaluate how one is going to
live and ask, “AM I LIVING HOW I WANT TO LIVE IF THIS IS
THE LAST MONTH OF MY
LIFE?”
Live
your life! Don’t let your age limit your
future growth as a human being.
Remember, many people matured at an old age and became eventually
became
revered as great in other’s eyes….
The
famous painting “Whistler’s mother“, was painted when the artist was in their
80’s. Abraham and Sarah gave birth to
their first children who
would become the future nations of Israel and the
Arabian states when they were nearly 100 years old.
Don’t
struggle to climb the ladder of success only to find out that it was leaning
against the wrong wall. Seek to discover
and grow the talents that
God has put within you from before birth. Remember, love heals. I do not claim that
love heals everything, but it can heal and in the process of healing,
cures
occur also.
The relationship
between attitude and disease
Here
is Norman Cousin’s experience with suspected tuberculosis as he described it in
“Anatomy of an Illness:
My first experience in coping with a
bleak medical diagnosis came at the age of ten, when I was sent to a
tuberculosis sanatorium. I was terribly
frail and underweight and it seemed logical to suppose that I was in the grip
of a serious malady. Later it was
discovered that the doctors had
mistakenly interpreted normal calcification as
TB markings. X-rays at that time were
not yet a totally reliable basis for complex diagnosis. In any case,
I spent
six months at the sanatorium.
What was most interesting to me about
that early experience was that patients divided themselves into two groups:
those who were confident they
would beat back the disease and be able to resume
normal lives and those who resigned themselves to a prolonged and even fatal
illness. Those of
us who held to the
optimistic view became good friends, involved ourselves in creative activities
and had little to do with the patients who had resigned themselves to the
worst. When newcomers arrived at the
hospital, we did our best to recruit them before the bleak brigade went to
work.
I couldn’t help being impressed with the
fact that the boys in my group had a far higher percentage of “discharged as
cured” outcomes than
the kids in the other group. Even at the age of ten I was being
philosophically conditioned; I became aware of the power of the mind in
overcoming
disease. The lessons I
learned about hope at that time played an important part in my complete
recovery and in the feelings I have had since about the
preciousness of life.
Sir
William Osler, the brilliant Canadian physician and medical historian, said
that the outcome of tuberculosis had more to do with what went on in the
patient’s mind than what went on his lungs. He was echoing Hippocrates, who
said he would rather know what sort of a person has a disease rather t
han what
sort of disease a person has. Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard, two of the
giants of nineteenth century biology, argued all of their lives w
hether the
most important factor in disease was the “soil” - the human body- or the germ. On his deathbed, Pasteur admitted that
Bernard had been
right, declaring, “It is the soil.”
Most
doctors seldom consider how a patient’s attitude towards life shapes their
life’s quantity and quality. Patients
vary enormously. Some will do
almost
anything rather than alter their lives to increase their chances for a
cure. When offered a choice between an
operation and a change in lifestyle,
eight out of ten say, “Operate. It hurts less. That way all I have to do is get a babysitter
for the week I’m in the hospital.”
At
the other extreme are survivors. They refuse to participate in defeat, often
spending much time cheering up others on the phone or visiting others to
encourage them in their life.
However,
we all know that many people live their lives as though trying to cut them
short. They harbor conscious or
unconscious “death wishes”
through continued bad habits, refusing to deal with
conflicts or pressures in their lives.
It appears that we do have biological “live” and “die”
mechanisms within
us.
The
state of the mind changes the state of the body by working through the central
nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system.
Peace of mind sends the body a “live”
message, while depression, fear and unresolved conflict give it a “die”
message. Thus all healing is scientific,
even if science can’t yet explain exactly how the unexpected miracles occur.
Everyone
can be a survivor and the best time to get healthy is before getting sick.
The
fundamental problem most patients face is an inability to love themselves,
having been unloved by others during some crucial part of their lives.
This period is almost always childhood, when
our relations with our parents establish our characteristic ways of reacting to
stress. As adults we repeat
reactions
and make ourselves vulnerable to illness and our personalities often determine
the specific nature of the illnesses.
The ability to love our self,
combined with the ability to love life,
fully accepting that it won’t last forever enables one to improve the quality
of life. The true role of physicians
should be to help patients get well and at the same time to understand why they
became sick in the first place. Then they
can go on to true healing, not
merely a reversal of one particular disease.
No
one lives forever; therefore, death is not the issue. Life is.
Death is not a failure. Not
choosing to take on the challenge of life is failure.
We
must remove the word “impossible”
from our vocabulary. Anyone who doesn’t
believe in miracles is not a realist.
“The
great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic
duplicity. Your health is bound to be
affected if day after day you say the
opposite of what you feel, if you gravel
before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but
misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t
just
a function, it is part of our physical body and our soul exists in space
and is inside us, like the teeth inside our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with
impurity.
(A
quote from Borus Pasternar in the book Doctor Zhivago)
The
mind does not act only through our conscious choices, however. Many of its effects are achieved directly on
the body’s tissues, without any
awareness on our part. Consider some of our
common expressions: “He’s a pain in the neck/rear”. “Get off my back.” “This problem is eating me up
alive.” “You’re breaking my heart.”
The
body responds to the mind’s messages, whether conscious or unconscious. In general, these may either be “live” or
“die” messages. I am
convinced we not
only have survival mechanisms such as the fight-or-flight response, but also a
“die” mechanism that actively stops our defenses,
slowing the body’s functions
and bringing us toward death when we feel our life is not worth living.
Every
tissue and organ in the body is controlled by a complex interaction among
chemicals circulating in the bloodstream, the hormones secreted by
our
endocrine glands. This mixture is
controlled by the “master gland”, the pituitary gland, located in the middle of
the head just below the brain.
The
output of the pituitary hormones in turn is controlled by both chemical
secretions and nerve impulses from the neighboring part of the brain called
the
hypothalamus. The tiny region regulates
most of the body’s unconscious maintenance processes such as heartbeat,
breathing, blood pressure,
temperature and so forth.
Nerve
fibers enter the hypothalamus from nearly all other regions of the brain, so
that intellectual and emotional processes occurring elsewhere in
the brain
affect the body. For example, about
twenty two years ago child development researchers discovered “psychosocial
dwarfism”, a
disturbingly common syndrome in which an unhealthy emotional
atmosphere at home stunts a child’s physical growth. When a child is caught in
a
crossfire of hostility and feels rejected by his or her parents thereby
growing up with little self-esteem, the brain’s emotional center called the
limbic
system, acts upon the nearby hypothalamus to shut off the pituitary
gland’s production of growth hormone.
The
immune system consists of more than a dozen different types of white blood
cells concentrated in the spleen, thymus gland and lymph nodes that
are
patrolling the entire body through the blood and lymphatic systems. They are divided up into two main types. One group called B cells produce
chemicals
that neutralize poisons made by disease organisms while helping the body
mobilize its own defenses. The other
group called T cells consist
of killer cells and their helpers which destroy
invading bacteria and viruses. Recent
research over the past twenty years has shown heretofore unknown
nerves
connecting the thymus and spleen directly to the hypothalamus. Other work has proven that white blood cells
respond directly to the same
chemicals that carry messages from one nerve cell
to another. The immune system then is
controlled by the brain, either indirectly through hormones
in the bloodstream
or directly through the nerves and neurochemicals. One of the most widely
accepted explanations of cancer, the “surveillance”
theory, states that cancer
cells are developing in our bodies all the time but are normally destroyed by
white blood cells before they can develop
into dangerous tumors. Cancer appears when the immune system becomes
suppressed and can no longer deal with the routine threat. It follows
then that whatever upsets the
brain’s control of the immune system will foster malignancy.
This
disruption occurs primarily by means of the chronic stress syndrome which was
first described by Hans Selye in 1936.
The mixture of
hormones released by the adrenal glands as part of the
fight-or-flight response suppresses the immune system. This was all right in
dealing with the
occasional threats our ancestors faced from wild beasts. However when the tension and anxiety of
modern life keep the stress response “on”
continually, the hormones lower our
resistance to disease, even withering away the lymph nodes. Moreover, there is now experimental evidence
that
“passive emotions” such as grief, feelings of failure and suppression of
anger, produce over secretions of these same hormones which suppress the
immune
system.
We
don’t yet fully understand all the ways in which the brain chemicals are
related to emotions and thoughts, but the salient point is that our state of
mind has an immediate and direct effect on our state of body. We can change the body by dealing with how we
feel. If we ignore our despair, the
body
receives a “die” message. If we deal
with our pain and seek help, then the message is ”living is difficult but
desirable” and the immune system
works to keep us alive.